By Saman Indrajith

The JVP yesterday asked the government to reveal the names of the four officials who had been in-charge of data erased from the National Medicines Regulatory Authority (NMRA) database, recently.

“We have serious doubts whether this loss of data had been caused by an invisible hand of the pharmaceutical mafia. This is a serious security issue. It is mysterious how an estimated two terabytes—or 2,000 gigabytes—of classified information just disappeared from the Lanka Government Cloud (LGC). It is said that there were only four officials who had access to that data. We call on the government to name and identify those officials because this loss would endanger the business relationships of local drug companies with their foreign principals,” JVP politburo member and former MP Sunil Handunnetti said.

Addressing a press conference held at the JVP headquarters in Pelawatte, the former MP said that Terabytes of information attached by pharmaceutical companies to their applications to the NMRA for registration and licensing of medication have “disappeared” from the LGC.

“The government is bound by the responsibility to tell the nation the truth about this mysterious data loss. It is said that the CID is in the process of conducting an investigation. We assume that the Telecommunication Department too has a responsibility in this regard. Therefore the government should be in a position to tell people what has happened. There is a serious suspicion that this had been engineered by the paid-servants of the pharmaceutical mafia. If the government is not protecting the culprits it should reveal the names of those responsible for the loss. Unless the government does so we have reason to believe that there is a political connection in this matter,” Handunnetti said.